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WHO could have guessed five years ago that the Israeli prime minister
meeting the American president in the Oval Office last week would be
Ariel Sharon? Elected in a landslide after the Palestinians organized a
war of attrition against Israelis–despite unprecedented peace offers from
his predecessor, Ehud Barak–Sharon is now seen by his countrymen as
the man who can end the violence, and not pay for peace with the
devalued coin of concessions. Sharon's stature, ironically, is due in
large measure to Yasser Arafat. If he proved anything during the arduous
but ultimately fruitless negotiations with Barak, Arafat convinced even
the doves in Israel that pre-emptive concessions and magnanimous
gestures are simply exercises in futility. Israelis understand fully today
that they must reject Arafat's view that agitation and guerrilla warfare can
demoralize Israel into making more concessions–or spark such a violent
Israeli response that it will alienate the West, which would seek to
impose its own solution on Israel.

Sharon has turned the Arafat dialectic on its ear. He has made it clear
that an end to the violence is a precondition for a return to negotiations.
Negotiating in the midst of violence, Sharon understands, serves only to
embed in Palestinians the belief that Israel will accept the condition of
violence. Sharon's purpose is not to negotiate a final-status agreement.
The object lesson of Camp David and the war of attrition Palestinians
launched immediately afterward is that the Palestinian leadership is not
ripe for a historic compromise with Israel. Sharon speaks for a huge
majority of Israelis who believe it is impossible to conclude a peace
agreement with those whose hostile intentions have recently been made
so clear. What is the point of concessions, after all, if they are repaid
only with hatred and bloodshed? What is one to make of the gleeful
destruction of Jewish holy places? Or of the lynching of two Israeli
soldiers in Ramallah as Palestinian men and women exulted? Sharon
certainly knows: For now, tragically, the idea that the Palestinians would
agree to share the Holy Land as peaceful neighbors must be rejected as
hopelessly naive.

So Sharon will not play Arafat's game. He knows too well how that goes.
Arafat ratchets up the violence while posing as Israel's victim. Then
CNN's cameras, with their bias for capturing image after image of
Palestinian victims, rush in. Sympathizers like the European Union
scramble to Arafat's side. Sharon will have none of that. He will seek to
apply pressures against terrorism that won't make for good TV and
provoke still more hostility against Israel. That is why he is reducing,
through closure, areas of contact between Israelis and Palestinians
rather than increasing military force. In the end, of course, increased
violence by Palestinians may force Sharon to deploy greater force. But
that will be his last alternative.

Deterrence and disengagement. Sadly, the violence, since Sharon's
election, has intensified. Almost every Palestinian organization
today–Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tanzim–is involved. And not only
has the Palestinian Authority failed to stop them, it has freed some of
the most dangerous terrorists from its jails. Israel has brought
substantial evidence to American intelligence officials to support its
contention that the PA stands behind the violence in many of the
killings.

But just as his negotiations with Barak exposed the folly of
concessions, Arafat's reliance on violence has unified Israelis in a way
they have not been in years. The violence has brought together doves
like Shimon Peres and nationalists like Sharon into a single cabinet, in
response to an overwhelming vote that made it abundantly clear what
the Israeli people wanted. More than ever, Israelis understand the
importance of restoring the credibility of Israeli deterrence. And they
believe Sharon understands that deterrence–and maybe only
deterrence–is what will keep Israel secure.

Sharon's goal is simple. He wants to establish rules for coexistence in
the framework of a long-term interim agreement. This is a lot less than
what Barak offered the Palestinians, and they may be unwilling to
accept it. What Israelis accept now is the following: There is an
unsolvable conflict between two national communities within a small
geographic area, each with incompatible national aspirations. This new
realization crushed the hope that there could be an agreement between
the leadership of the Israelis and the Palestinians. Arafat has the stature
to sign such an accord, but instead of repudiating the violence, he has
fueled it.

Good diplomacy, it is said, occurs when all other options have been
exhausted. The only feasible option today is disengagement–to put as
much space as possible between the two sides. Until there is
supportable evidence that the Palestinians are really prepared to end the
conflict, this is what we are left with. But disengagement will be
complicated because of the intertwining of these two peoples in such a
small place. Nevertheless, what is needed is an agreement that would
involve a strategic Israeli withdrawal from most of the territory, in return
for a protracted truce and, ultimately, the kind of nonbelligerence that
Israel agreed to with Egypt in 1975. This would give the Palestinians a
more viable, contiguous area, one that could be recognized and run as a
truly independent state. It would require the Israelis to dismantle many
of the smaller settlements in the territories outside of the areas closer to
the major Israeli cities, where some 80 percent of the settlers now live.
One Israeli newspaper reports that Sharon is already prepared to
consider eliminating settlements in Gaza that are surrounded by
thousands of hostile Palestinians.

Learning lessons. The whole objective is to establish boundaries and
borders–to reduce the daily friction that has created so much conflict.
The Palestinians may well not agree, and there is no reason to suppose
at this point that they will. If that doesn't change, Israel may have to
consider drawing its own territorial lines. But it must find a way to do
this in a manner that Palestinians will not interpret unilateral dismantling
of isolated settlements as a sign of more Israeli weakness. The Israelis
will have to wait until the violence abates and the credibility of their
deterrence is re-established.

And as for Jerusalem, it would seem appropriate to revisit the
arrangements made by Moshe Dayan, after the Six-Day War in 1967.
Under the protocols drafted by the legendary defense minister, the
Arabs administered the shrines on the Temple Mount while the Jews
exercised police power in all of Jerusalem. This remains the best and
most tolerable arrangement.

The Palestinians have consistently taken an all-or-nothing approach and
thus enshrined their reputation as a people who, in Abba Eban's telling
phrase, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This was so
in 1947, with the United Nations partition, and was repeated in 1979,
with the Camp David Accords. In each case, the Palestinians insisted
on everything and wound up with nothing. This time, instead of
establishing a state, they are faced with the collapse of the Palestinian
Authority. Will they ever learn?

One thing, at least, seems clear: President Bush and his aides can
learn much from the failures of the Clinton administration in the Middle
East. Clinton's policies brought insecurity for Israel and diminished
credibility for the United States. One lesson is that Washington cannot
remain evenhanded in the traditional sense, criticizing both sides
equally, regardless of the true balance of blame or praise that should be
accorded in specific instances. The United States does not enhance its
credibility by blaming the party that has gone the extra mile for peace
equally with the party that has chosen war over compromise. Instead,
both sides must be measured by an equal standard, such as criticizing
aggression by either side and defending the right of each to self-defense.
It did not help that the Clinton administration refused to appropriately
condemn Palestinian violence in the face of their violation of two
cease-fires mediated by Washington. Self-defense and aggression, and
terrorism and the response to it, are not equivalent.

The Clinton administration failed to force the Palestinian side to
implement the conditions and obligations it assumed under Oslo, such
as confiscating illegal weapons, ending incitement, and the like. This
was never taken seriously by the Clinton administration–and, to some
degree, by some Israeli governments. It set the stage for the Palestinian
choice of violence over negotiations that we saw after Camp David. The
Palestinians concluded then that violations of their commitments to
resolve the conflict through peaceful means would have no real
consequences. Indeed, Palestinian intransigence came to be seen by
the United States not as an obstacle but as a given. It actually reduced
the pressure on Arafat to compromise when he saw that violence paid.

The new American administration must ensure that violence is not
rewarded, so that Palestinians do not think they can get a better deal by
fighting. Sharon will have to do for the Palestinians what Ronald Reagan
did for the Soviets. As the author Jonathan Rauch has pointed out,
Sharon will have to demonstrate that only long-term failure can result
from a long-term war of attrition. The Palestinian economy will wither,
and the quality of life for Palestinians will decline even further.

Ronald Reagan believed the United States would not win the Cold War
as long as Moscow believed it would win. He pushed the Soviets to help
them understand that, for them, the Cold War was not a winning
proposition and that they were wrong to think that they could fight forever
and that their adversaries could not. Sharon and Reagan assumed their
nations' highest positions of trust late in their lives. Reagan, finally, saw
his view vindicated. Time will tell whether Sharon will be similarly
blessed.

JWR contributor Mort Zuckerman is editor-in-chief and publisher of U.S. News and World Report. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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